Multiple Administrators Support

SonicOS supports multiple concurrent administrators with full administrator privileges, read-only privileges, and limited privileges. The original version of SonicOS supported only a single administrator to log on to a firewall with full administrative privileges. Additional users can be granted “limited administrator” access, but only one administrator can have full access to modify all areas of the SonicOS GUI at one time.

SonicOS provides support for multiple concurrent administrators. This feature allows for multiple users to log-in with full administrator privileges. In addition to using the default admin user name, additional administrator user names can be created. Because of the potential for conflicts caused by multiple administrators making configuration changes at the same time, only one administrator is allowed to make configuration changes. The additional administrators are given full access to the GUI, but they cannot make configuration changes.

Multiple Administrators Support provides the following benefits:

• Improved productivity: Allowing multiple administrators to access a firewall simultaneously eliminates auto logout, a situation that occurs when two administrators require access to the appliance at the same time and one is automatically forced out of the system.
• Reduced configuration risk: The new read-only mode allows users to view the current configuration and status of a firewall without the risk of making unintentional changes to the configuration.